The Problem With Religion: A Psycho-spiritual Perspective
Humanity has long used spiritual and religious belief to endow our lives with meaning and purpose, to connect with something beyond ourselves, and to better understand our place in the cosmos.
We first formed spiritual beliefs in order to explain natural phenomena beyond our current understanding, to provide comfort in the face of death and grief, and to give us guidance in the times of great uncertainty.
Religion and spirituality have played a vital role in our shared human history, and are not to be thought of as having no place in our modern age. They fulfill a deeply ingrained need for spiritual experience, one common throughout all of humanity. A spiritual drive that binds us as a species, acting as a leitmotif running throughout all of human existence.
Witold Pruszkowski - Falling Star
“It is now possible for humanity to awaken to the liberating fact that each of us is a star, as unique and self-radiant as our celestial counterparts. Instead of desperately trying to determine the will of God and then clumsily attempting to cooperate with it, each of us must now come to realize that our will, if properly understood and executed, is already in harmony with the divine will.
In other words, in this age, the holy quest is to discover one’s own way rather than trying to guess what a God wants for you and hope from moment to moment that you are guessing correctly.”
Why are we Leaving Religion Behind?
Emilia Roma - Paisagem com ruínas de igreja
In recent years, there has been a significant increase in the amount of Americans who do not associate with any religious organization. We are now seeing an unprecedented decrease in church attendance and a significant increase in religiously unaffiliated people.
The veneer of religion has lost its polish, and people, especially younger generations, are leaving in droves.
But why?
Religion has lost its relevancy
Antiquated worldviews and societal roles hold no bearing on a modern society that is developing past traditional gender roles and patriarchal norms.
Our horizons have broadened. We are now free to explore ourselves, and our individuality, without relying on religion’s outdated notions. Modern society celebrates self authenticity and expression, and we now have the freedom to live lives that feel genuine, not prescribed.
Moreover, science has instilled a healthy level of skepticism within the modern mind.
Science engages our curiosity, teaches us to think critically, to look for evidence, and question everything. Religion is typically at odds with science valuing faith over evidence. As our understanding of our universe grows, and as we fill the gaps of knowledge left by previous generations, there is increasingly little need to rely on explanations of faith.
A Guise for Hate
Since the dawn of religion, people and societies have employed it as an excuse for hatred, violence, and war.
Doctrine and religious writing are often misinterpreted and misused as a justification for intolerance. However, we should not assume that religion is inherently intolerant. Numerous teachings in major religions around the world preach messages of love and compassion. Yet, religion also reinforces the concept of a “group within” and a “group without.”
This notion of us and other engages our primitive tribal mentality.
It reinforces our bond with those who think like us, act like us, share the same religion as us, and believe the same things as us. Conversely, anything or anyone that does not belong to this "us" category gets excluded; Forgotten, feared or hated at worst.
This remains evident in religious practices today. Especially today, we are seeing a theocracy driven assault on LBGTQ+ peoples’ rights. Modern religious institution has become little more than a hollow justification for racism, homophobia, sexism, and bigotry.
Expanding Our Worldview
We live now in the age of information with the collective knowledge of our entire species at our fingertips.
In ages past, people had little access to information beyond that of their immediate families and villages. Education was a gift, a luxury. Even then, the level of education was nowhere near what we now have access to in mere seconds.
We’ve traded the family bible, passed down from generation to generation, for a computer that contains almost all the recorded knowledge of humankind.
We can access knowledge and perspectives previously inaccessible, and it has expanded our minds. We are no longer beholden to the beliefs of our parents, or culture, or immediate environment. Instead, it has become our duty to explore different beliefs and faiths, and to find where we fit in amongst them all.
Personal Disillusionment
Corruption, abuse, and scandal are rampant in modern religious institutions. It’s an open secret.
Many people leave religion behind not only because of their own direct experiences of abuse or neglect but also because it has prevented their family from healing the generational wounds they themselves carry.
When religion prevents people from confronting their own shadow—from thinking critically about their behaviors and seeking to heal instead of repent — trauma, especially generational trauma, goes unhealed.
One of the primary purposes of religion is to maintain social order. There is a preference for complacency over disruption and transformation, even when it is necessary.
Religion doesn’t grow the individual to be the best they could potentially be; to heal and make whole their congregation. It prescribes, it orders, it mandates. It keeps people contained, complacent, and catatonic to their own inner potential.
The Fundamental Problem with Religion
Gustave Dore - The Crucifixion of Jesus
“One of the main functions of organized religion is to protect people against a direct experience of God.”
Swiss psychiatrist, and father of depth psychology, Carl Jung wrote much about how religion acted as a hinderance to an individual’s personal psychological development.
The rigidity of religious dogma and tradition prescribes a notion of selfhood which acts as a barrier for the discovery of one’s own selfhood. Relying on external authority, such as that of religion, prevents our ability to think for ourselves, to find our own agency, and to understand and integrate our shadows.
Jung sought to understand the fundamental psychological problem with religion. He recognized that it no longer facilitated our psychological development and outlined the issues he observed to be occurring in modern man.
God is an Idol
“Thou shalt not make unto thee any graven image, or any likeness of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth. Thou shalt not bow down thyself to them nor serve them”
In his book Psychology and Alchemy, Jung poses that the issue with western religion is that by externalizing the image of god — by making him an object of worship, we forget that God himself is a psychological projection of a larger, universal archetype that exists within all of us.
For Jung, ‘God’ is the archetypal Self, the wholeness of our being and the soul’s striving towards that wholeness.
The experience of ‘God’ is an initiation, through mysticism, wonder, awe, or profound experience, into the potentiality of our beings.
This function of our psyche acts as a biological process that urges us to become who we truly are, all that we are;
To follow the quest for wholeness.
The role of that this god archetype plays in our psychology is in facilitating the integration of opposites. Integrating the conscious and unconscious, the personality, and the shadow, the binary, into a greater whole. Acknowledging that good and evil, virtue and sin, male and female, all exist equally within each of us.
Western religion portrays God as a being whose perfection is beyond our reach and must be worshiped. This mindset hinders the psychological process of 'God' from taking place and reduces 'God' to just a mere idol. Lost is the goal of wholeness, replaced only by superficiality.
“…that we should follow the ideal [of God] and seek to become like it— ought logically to have the result of developing and exalting the inner man. In actual fact, however, the ideal has been turned by superficial and formalistically-minded believers into an external object of worship, and it is precisely this veneration for the object that prevents it from reaching down into the depths of the psyche.”
Shame the Devil; Confront the Shadow
A religious orientation that preaches that one should only live a life of goodness, and virtue, and strive towards some impossible level of perfection prevents us from integrating our Shadow: our repressed self-ideas and weaknesses, our unconscious desires, and the aspects of ourselves that we reject, and repress but must integrate in order to achieve the soul-making goal of the inner god-archetype.
Within the shadow lies a muck of personal and generational trauma. Fears, repressed desired, all that we want to avoid, and religion gives us the perfect excuse to do so. When society teaches us to view the world as a binary, and we are told that only one side of that binary is right, and virtuous, we lose the ability to find moderation, to discover a way of balance instead of succumbing to supreme negation.
When we refuse the call to integrate the shadow — to realize it, and bring it into our sphere of awareness—
Its contents and qualities turn into unconscious complexes that we then project onto others. Hatred, fear, and bigotry cultivated by the ignorance of one’s own shadow.
Our task is not to ignore the shadow, as religion would have us do. Ignorance of our shadow allows it to overtake us, influencing our behaviors and perceptions. Our insecurities become flaws we find in other people. Our biases and prejudices go unacknowledged. We judge others while inflating our own ego.
Instead of falling victims to the shadow, our mortal task is to accept it with loving kindness.
“If you comprehend the darkness, it seizes you. It comes over you like the night with black shadows and countless shimmering stars. Silence and peace come over you if you begin to comprehend the darkness. Only he who does not comprehend the darkness fears the night.”
Our Spiritual Need Ignored
When we ignore, or are blinded to that call to wholeness and instead relinquish ourselves to this idolization of God, and the ignorance of our shadow, we give up our capacity for critical thinking. Tradition and dogma make our decisions for us and we relinquish the opportunity to develop our spiritual function for ourselves.
“To undergo an exclusively religious projection may rob the soul of its values so that through sheer inanition it becomes incapable of further development and gets stuck in an unconscious state. At the same time it falls victim to the delusion that the cause of all misfortune lies outside, and people no longer stop to ask themselves how far it is their own doing ”
Jung believed it was through inanition — a severe lack of nourishment — that religion leaves our spiritual needs ignored. This is the cause of people departing, not because the spiritual desire is no longer there, but because religion cannot satisfy it.
He noticed the spiritual drive within humans; that spirituality runs, like a vein, throughout our culture and history, as evidenced by stories, myths, and dreams. This spiritual drive, if properly realized, puts us on a path of individuation, of making ourselves and our souls whole, and becoming what we were destined to be from our very beginning.
When we ignore, or are blinded to that call to wholeness and instead relinquish ourselves to this idolization of God, and the ignorance of our shadow, we give up our capacity for critical thinking. Tradition and dogma make our decisions for us and we relinquish the opportunity to develop our spiritual function for ourselves.
“Christian civilization has proved hollow to a terrifying degree: it is all veneer, but the inner man has remained untouched and therefore unchanged. His soul is out of key with his external beliefs; in his soul the Christian has not kept pace with external developments. Yes, everything is to be found outside— in image and in word, in Church and Bible— but never inside.
Inside reign the archaic gods, supreme as of old; that is to say the inner correspondence with the outer God-image is undeveloped for lack of psychological culture and has therefore got stuck in heathenism. Christian education has done all that is humanly possible, but it has not been enough. Too few people have experienced the divine image as the innermost possession of their own souls.
Christ only meets them from without, never from within the soul; that is why dark paganism still reigns there, a paganism which, now in a form so blatant that it can no longer be denied and now in all too threadbare disguise, is swamping the world of so-called Christian civilization.”
Reclaiming Spirituality from Religion
Cavern, near Naples, Joseph Wright of Derby (English, 1734-1797)
“Have your congregation understood that they must close their ears to traditional teachings and go through the darkness of their own souls and set aside everything in order to become that which every individual bears in himself as his individual task, and that no one can take this burden from him?”
Carl Jung believed that people have an ingrained, psychological need to seek spiritual experience. This spiritual drive, he thought, was as real as our drive for food and water, and as compulsory as our fear of death.
A contemporary of Jung’s, Abraham Maslow, founder of humanistic psychology, theorized of a similar need. He called it the need for Self-Actualization and beyond that, self-transcendence.
As we fulfill lower-level needs for food and shelter, safety and security, belongingness and community, we are ever more motivated to achieve a more sophisticated way of being.
We will feel the ever-growing need to realize our fullest potential; to understand all of our capabilities and limitations and hold both; to seek spiritual fulfillment and oneness with the world; to broaden our horizons and expand our minds, and live in search of awe, wonder, and spiritual ecstasy.
Studies in psychology show that when individuals feel a spiritual connection, they tend to have a greater sense of meaning and security in life. Despite the shortcomings of religion, we can still take guidance from spirituality.
However, western religions and institutions have failed to meet this need. Instead, more and more people are leaving religion behind and seeking a form of personal spirituality.
This spiritual drive motives us to establish a direct relationship with the ‘divine’, however spiritually or secularly we choose to define it.
Fulfilling the spiritual need facilitates a process Jung called individuation.
“The concept of individuation plays a large role in our psychology. In general, it is the process by which individual beings are formed and differentiated; in particular, it is the development of the psychological individual as a being distinct from the general, collective psychology. Individuation, therefore, is a process of differentiation, having for its goal the development of the individual personality.”
Individuation brings us past our need for external authority figures, including parental influence, societal expectations, and, of course, religious doctrine and tradition.
Instead, individuation leads us to discover our self-authority and to distinguish ourselves from the general, collective psychology. To separate ourselves from the tribalism and group-think of religious institution.
Individuation is our spiritual goal. It is what spiritual, mystic experiences drive us towards. It is why the spiritual need is such an important one. Forgotten, we fall victim to the authority of our creed, and of our own shadow. Properly realized, it sets us on a path of self-authority, self-actualization, and, eventually, self-transcendence.
“A plant that is meant to produce a flower is not individuated if it does not produce a flower, it must fulfill the cycle; and the man that does not develop consciousness is not individuated, because consciousness is his flower, it is his life, it belongs to our process of individuation that we shall become conscious.
You see, all that a man does, whatever he attempts, means his individuation, it is an accomplishment, a fulfillment of his possibilities; and one of his foremost possibilities is the attainment of consciousness. That really makes him man: to man, life should be conscious.”
Our Path Forwards
The Age of Religion is coming to a close. God has become no more than an idol of worship, and religion is only a fading veneer for control. No longer can we use religion as an excuse, hiding behind church walls and biblical texts while spewing the hatred of our own repressed shadow.
We are entering the age of Individuation, where spirituality is a personal, not societal, experience. Fulfilling this need with a personal path ushers us past the need for external authority and endows us with the agency to be our authentic selves.
We must now engage with religious beliefs critically, understanding the difference between the psychological god archetype, and the idol of god so many are content to worship blindly and unquestioningly.
We must not forget the importance of spirituality in our modern lives, though religion has perverted it for many. We must balance our scientific skepticism with our longing to be a part of something greater than ourselves.
This is the task of the modern mystic — one of self-discovery and individuation.
